Openness and Hack of a fest

Hack of a fest sounds good.

"Openness is part of the magic for us," said Dickerson. "If you go around Silicon Valley there is this whole veneer of privacy."

"You aren't greeted with open arms if you knock on the door and say 'What are you doing?' With hack day, we are saying we want you to knock on the door and see what we are doing."

and

Since beginning internal hack days last year, Yahoo has held them at facilities in Australia, India, Europe and the US.

"There are some major products coming that were conceived and built at hack days," Dickerson said. "We can't wait to tell people."

More and more companies are doing this. It's always been a trend I guess. Get smart people to show you how to do things for free, then build products out of them and make more money. This is all Yahoo is doing here.

Even the vendor of a product I work on at work has said the same thing to me (while taking me out for an expensive lunch). "Wow, that sounds cool - why don't you show us a demo of what you've done and then we can build a product like it for you. That way you you won't need to support it and you'll just get it out of the box!" (No, I'll just have to build on top of yours and then pay for mediocre support from people who didn't build the product - genius).

How about showing the rest of us the openness Yahoo! "We can't wait to tell people" indeed.